Find My Friends Feature Coming To MobileMe Soon

It’s not a live feature in the recently released iOS 4.3 dev beta, but it looks as if Apple will be adding a new feature to its MobileMe service sometime soon, making it easy to see where your friends — or, at least, their iPhones and iPads — are when they’re late for dinner and drinks.

Spotted by MacRumors, several strings in the new Settings app reference a “Find My Friends” feature.

While it’s unknown what, exactly, this is referring to, the name seems pretty self-descriptive: a service coming to iOS and MobileMe that allows you to locate your friends, a la Google Latitude or Loopt.

That’s pretty cool, and no one’s sneezing at new iOS functionality, but MobileMe’s $99 per year cost isn’t really going to be any more justified than it already is by the addition of a feature that is identical to what Google’s providing with a free app.

MobileMe’s improvements aren’t likely to end here, though: Steve Jobs said that 2011 was the year MobileMe would get “a lot better” and we’re inclined to take him at his word.